Tony Blair served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007. Despite his decade-worth of service, he didn’t form a good relationship with Queen Elizabeth.
In fact, Tony Blair and Her Majesty had a very up-and-down friendship throughout the 10 years that they work together. The British politician even revealed that Queen Elizabeth brought him back down to earth during their first meeting.
After Tony Blair officially became Prime Minister of the U.K., Queen Elizabeth formally invited him on May 2, 1997. He recalled the meeting in a 2002 report by the Telegraph and shared that their relationship did not start well.
“She did say to me that Winston Churchill was the first Prime Minister that she dealt with, and that was before I was born,” he said. “So I got a sense of my, er, my relative seniority, or lack of it.”
Tony Blair was only 43 years old when he took the role of Prime Minister. He also never held a government office before that. Despite not having much in common with Her Majesty, Blair revealed that he trusted Queen Elizabeth and shared his innermost thoughts with her.
“There are only two people in the world frankly to whom a Prime Minister can say what he likes about Cabinet colleagues. One’s the wife, and the other’s the Queen,” he said. “She [the Queen] is about the only person that you can tell something to in complete confidence and know that the confidence will never be broken. And I’ve done that on.”
In the 1992 documentary titled Elizabeth R, the Queen reflected on the importance of her Prime Ministers. She shared that they may come and go, but she appreciated the fact that they gave her different angles of a certain matter.
“I have had quite a lot of Prime Ministers, starting with Winston. Some stayed longer than others. They unburden themselves or they tell me what is going on or if they got any problem. Sometimes one can help in that way too,” Her Majesty said. “They know that one can be impartial, I think it’s rather nice to feel that one is a sort of a sponge and everybody can tell one things. Some things stay there and some things go out the other ear and some things never come out at all. Nobody knows about it. Occasionally you can be able to put someone’s point of view that perhaps they hadn’t seen from that angle.”
This just proves that, even though Queen Elizabeth and Tony Blair didn’t really have an ideal relationship for 10 years, the Monarch still respected him and his ideas.
